Chapter 4

"You probably should kick my ass." Noah"s chuckle was soft but sexy. "Trouble is, I might enjoy it too much. And we ain"t got time for that."

We hiked along in silence for a while. Noah was letting me simmer down. That too can be enraging, but... well... he was cute, and he probably did have logic on his side, and the exercise of hiking downhill was burning off some of my excess energy.

Also, did I mention he was cute?

"OK," I finally said. "You"re still got some explaining to do." I may have growled a little. No need to let him think he was going to get off that easy.

"No problem." He sounded too cheerful. Too forgiven.

You insist on wrapping me around your little finger, don"t you?

Taking a deep breath, I reminded myself to be the bigger man. After all, I was the bigger man.

"So we agree they stashed us in a short-term rental they haven"t used before," I said after a minute. "I guess that"s pretty smart."

"Sure," Noah said. "It"s safer than keeping somebody prisoner in your own place. It puts another layer of distance between us and the bad guys."

"So who are these unseen bad guys? Any ideas?"

"Nothing"s changed since the last time you asked, Slate. Your guess is as good as mine."

"I doubt it." My growl wasn"t a tactic this time. It was a sincere gesture of frustration. "You have to know more because you"re the target. You"ve got to have some idea why."

"Maybe I was the target at one time, but..." When Noah shrugged, the toga shifted more than it had earlier. Maybe I"d accidentally loosened his knot when I was futzing around with him back at the house.

Or maybe he was trying to distract me. What did I really know?

These alternating waves of trust and distrust were exhausting.

"Why would anybody want to kidnap me?" I asked. "A quarterback without a team doesn"t do you much good. Unless you"ve got another team. And you still don"t have to kidnap me. You recruit me. The target"s got to be you. I"m only here to put pressure on you."

That sounded bad. Like I was blaming him.

Fortunately, he didn"t seem to notice my lack of tact. "Actually, I can think of several reasons you might snatch a quarterback." His tone was the tone of the relaxed spitballer. "Like, maybe they think the alumni will pay a good ransom. That lounge of y"all"s is pretty good evidence you"ve got some deep pockets on tap."

"Hey. Don"t hate on the lounge. You were getting your share of the lounge." More than his share, since he was loading up on the complimentary booze and food for his homeless buddies.

"I"m not hating. I"m just saying. The university gets a lot of shit because of how much they spend on the athletic program."

"Nobody would"ve ever heard of the university if not for the football program. Not anybody from out of state anyway. It"s good for everybody if we"ve got a winning team, and that takes cash. A lot of it."

"I"m just saying it looks bad they didn"t make time to fix the flooded library while the athletes are living their best life in sixty-million-dollar private lounges."

"For fuck sake. You had to put a number on it."

"I didn"t say it. Social media said it."

"I know. So keep not saying it."

He went quiet. But I didn"t. I couldn"t. My blood was up again. As it always was when the team was under attack.

"Let me tell you something, bro. We didn"t get kidnapped because somebody"s got their panties in a snarl over the fucking library funding. Of all the bullshit that never happened, that"s the one that most definitely did not happen."

Noah wisely chose to keep on staying quiet. I was walking faster, so he sped up some to keep ahead on the trail.

That"s one advantage of being all pissed off. You move faster.

"The alumni want the team to have that money. We do a great job of fund-raising. The librarians could learn something if they weren"t too busy hating on the jocks."

I heard myself ranting. Was this a fight? This was too stupid to be a fight.

Also, I was the only one fighting.

Time to shut up for a change.

I forced myself to slow up. Cool down. Breathe. Noah got a little further ahead of me again. Then he noticed and slowed up too.

Only later would I realize he"d effectively distracted me from asking any more questions about why they"d kidnap a homeless coder. But, yeah, at the time, the play blew right through me.

After a while he said, "It"s not your fault, Slate. None of this is your fault. You know that, right?"

I didn"t say anything.

"It"s the fault of the bad guys who put us here," he said. "Nobody else."

"Yeah, yeah."

He was trying. Also, he was right. We moved on. A bird was warbling off in the distance. Another one warbled back.

It felt like we were alone in a lost world. And yet...

Noah stopped suddenly while swinging out his arm like a roadblock to stop me too.

We both stood absolutely dead quiet. Had he heard something? I held my breath.

Insects buzzed. The same two birds—or another pair singing the same tune—sang high and sweet. Beyond, a breeze clattered through something that sounded like palm fronds. The steady low boom of the surf confirmed we were getting close to the beach.

Noah looked back at me, a question in his eyes. I had no answer but a shrug. Whatever he"d heard, I hadn"t.

Same as with the trail cameras. We"d probably passed others, but I hadn"t spotted a single one.

He started moving forward again.

"What was it?" I whispered. The song of the surf might mask our voices this close to the beach. But I wasn"t taking any chances.

"I don"t know." He was whispering too. "Nothing, probably."

"What did ‘nothing probably' sound like?"

"Something like a cry, but it could"ve been a bird. A gull maybe off in the distance."

The situation was getting to us. I was tired of getting freaked out by owls and gulls. But anybody would be a little freaked out.

We rounded one more curve to see a bright patch ahead where the shrubbery opened up to sunlight.

Although still some distance away, the sugar-white sand and aquamarine sea looked painfully bright after the deep shade of the tropical forest. Blinking, we moved forward even more slowly.

In a minute, we"d have to break cover.

What if someone was already down here waiting for us?